After employees opt to be paid in Bitcoin, the Internet Archive asks for donations in the digital currency

The Internet Archive on Thursday made a bold announcement: the organization is considering giving all its employees the option to be paid in Bitcoin. The move is apparently in response to employees asking to be paid in the digital currency, as soon as this April.

Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, currently the most-widely used alternative to common forms of money. Because it has no central issuer, it has no single authority and thus no way to lock out certain users (or countries) out of the network. Bitcoin can be used to pay for certain transactions both offline and online.

The Internet Archive says it wants to make being paid in Bitcoin a continuing option. Here’s the organization’s take on it:

As Bitcoin is becoming the “local currency” of the Internet, then the Internet Archive would like to help support it and use it. In the last 2 years, over 300 people have graciously donated bitcoins to the Internet Archive.

Instead of converting its money to Bitcoin, however, the Internet Archive figures it can just ask for donations. Here’s the company’s Bitcoin address: 17gN64BPHtxi4mEM3qWrxdwhieUvRq8R2r (other donation methods are here).

You might be wondering why you should bother donating. What has the Internet Archive ever done for you?

Well, just last month, the organization updated the Wayback Machine with a significant bump in coverage: the service went from 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, or a total of about 5 petabytes of data. More specifically, the Wayback Machine covers the Web from late 1996 to December 9, 2012.

If you ever want to see how a website looked like between these years, whether it’s just for fun or for a research project, the non-profit organization has your back.